Brennan B2 2TB Black Hifi - Hard disk CD ripper & recorder, storage and player with Bluetooth, Youtube, Internet Radio, Stereo Power amplifier, NAS, Wav, Lossless (FLAC) and MP3.

After contemplating buying a B2 for a few months I bought a 2TB model.I've been very satisfied with it. I've had it a week and have been ripping my cd collection every evening. I've done a couple of hundred with a thousand to go.Delivery was next day.The sound quality is excellent and found that I could do away with my existing amp as the output from the b2 drives my speakers with enough volume without a sign of distortion.Overall I'm very pleased with it and glad I finally got around to buying one.

This is a great product if you're looking to digitise a CD collection. Ripping is not particularly faster than other means, but FLAC sound quality is excellent and the ease of use is pretty good - just stick a disc in and wait for it to rip.Once your music is on there, and assuming you're on a wifi network, it's easy enough to access it via the online portal via any device on the network. Using the remote or buttons on the unit is not recommended as you have to literally cycle through letters to type your search results, so you'll want to use the online portal. However, the native version is really limited, especially in that it won't let you construct playlists on the fly, or queue music up song by song as they occur to you. I bought the MusicStreamer app for iOS for a fiver which connects to the Brennan by wifi and handles everything much, much better. Brennan devs should really look to that app for inspiration. It's a pain though, as using a third party app means you have to loop the device back to the Brennan via Bluetooth in order to use any speakers connected to the Brennan. That's why I don't use its hi-fi functionality, but rather use it as a NAS drive that my iOS device connects to, then plays via other Bluetooth speakers. I did my homework and found this solution myself and it saved this product for me. If I was forced to use the native online portal, this would lose 2-3 stars as it is unfortunately not (yet?) fit for purpose.That said, the software is updated regularly and has added features like being able to play songs from YouTube, which is probably pretty cool for someone. Hopefully they'll improve it so it's worth using over a third party alternative.It's easy to back-up and physically well designed and well made. File architecture is a bit fiddly, and I'm not totally sure a 2TB version can actually fit any more than the 1TB version, as I know there is a hard limit on the number of albums you can have (10,000 I think) regardless of disk size. Worth mentioning that the company website has a lot of FAQ and is regularly updated and pretty helpful.

Great for storing all your cds in one place, ripping is quick but changing from MP3 to FLAC is very slow. Credit card style remote seem difficult to control the unit (guess time will tell) Lacks a sound modes/equaliser so what you get is a standard sound. Overall it’s a winner

On the plus side, it sounds good... though more so as a CD player than from the hard drive... I listen through Beyer headphones via a chord mojo.The minuses however are many... the most annoying of which are regular freezing (this even freezes the clock, rendering even that function useless), the fact that it cannot find any information on any of my albums on it's database or the internet, and the poor user interface..I've tried to like it, but these problems alone render it to be just an overpriced CD transport for me. I will probablyreplace it with a dedicated CD transport at some point, one which does a better job for less money.***UPDATE***It won't recognise a USB stick either!

I bought a Brennan from Amazon in November and have waited a while before writing a review as I wanted to live with it a bit. On paper, after the NAS drive functionality for Sonos was introduced, buying it became a bit of a "no brainer." Other than being able to stream Spotify occasionally, it did everything I wanted. However, I thought I was buying a music system that "happened" to run on Linux. In reality, I ended up with a Linux computer that happens to play music off a hard-disc.I spent the Christmas holidays ripping my entire CD collection. It wasn't entirely painless. I did not find the process as "intuitive" as I expected. Once it was on, I thought: "Great. Let's play some music." Unfortunately, it didn't index properly. An email to Brennan elicited that I needed to run "scan disc" and the recommended approach involved backing up the hard disc. I bought a hard disc from Amazon. It came formatted as NTFS which the Brennan didn't recognise. An email to Brennan again. They offered to lend me a disc but, by the time they responded, I'd solved the problem. It now works. It plays music for hours - which is what I wanted. Unfortunately, there's a continuous "clicking" at low volumes which I cannot get rid of. I contacted Brennan again. They were supposed to send me a new wireless dongle but it's never arrived so I just play the music at a level where I can't hear the clicking.Like many of the other reviewers, I'd love to love it. It's designed in Britain - even if not built here and I like to support home-grown business, where I can. But it all just feels a bit too amateurish and lacking in maturity compared to the competition.Since writing this review, I've bought a new wireless dongle which partly cured the clicking problem (it still clicked - but less often). I fully cured it by hard-wiring it to the router. I still find searching for music using the app frustrating and, if I want to listen to a specific CD, I find it easier to fetch it and play it directly. A couple of people have written comments asking: "What competition?" The alternative I was looking at was a Yamaha Music cast system that I could stream music to. Now, I think I'd probably buy a Naim QB and forgo the hard-disc.